Hi Everyone
I am soon going to start experimenting with migration to different platforms to see what is converted and what could possibly be lost in migrating away from IP Board.
I have noticed over time that the site seems to be getting a bit slower and yeah I use Tapitalk for mobile viewing of the forums. But I would like to upgrade to something that is more responsive and looks good on mobile devices.
A few weeks ago there was some downtime for SSC because I tried to upgrade Apache and MSSQL to newer versions and this crashed the site, this was a very simple upgrade to minor versions so there shouldn't have been really any issues but there was so this is concerning to me since SSC is running a soon to be deprecated version of PHP so I do want to get this updated soon to avoid a urgent issue if my hosts just upgrades.
I will try to keep the community involved with this project and get feedback as to usability and look and feel. I have been really looking into Wordpress, BBPress (forums) and various plugins (like CM Download Manager, gallery) to accomplish what the site does now. I really liked Discourse forum software because it looks nice and is very mobile friendly. But it doesn't have any sort of article/download/gallery components so login across multiple apps couldn't be seamless (ie: single sign-on).
Few things that I will or wanted to have or work on getting implemented in a new site upgrade:
- Forums (of course)
- Articles (way for myself or others to create site content or introduce new games to the community)
- Download area (for free downloads and also allow payment transactions to indie devs to sell their games directly to you)
- Game listing (I know its broken right now, working on updating and fixing it now)
- Main page that has a similar layout but is also mobile friendly (might need lots of feedback on this as to what should be there)
- (wants) a video gallery of youtube videos linked in by game title or just a mash of trailers and gameplay videos, not sure on sorting this out yet. would love to populate it via api/rest commands to autopopulate a page by tags... but that could be problematic
- (not sure) if I am going to keep the galleries since they are not widely used
- (wants) I have always wanted to have a WIKI that slowly builds towards having a huge library of game titles and info on them (HUGE UNDERTAKING, and why I gave up a few times already)
Trust me I would like to let SSC stay as it is but technology changes makes me have to upgrade, so I have to do this process every few years unless I run a server myself (which I thought about), but I think I would have issues in doing that in the back woods of New Hampshire 🙂
I will keep everyone posted on this process and I hope this will not be too painful and the conversion process is somewhat successful. Because I can manually convert blog/articles over to wordpress, my main concerns is forum posts, users, download files (a lot of work here). So thanks for the understanding and if anyone has any recommendations for software to move SSC too then please do speak up and I will investigate it. The biggest thing to tackle is the topics/posts in the forums so a conversion tool for IP Board might be necessary, because I certainly don't want to build sql queries and a database myself to convert IP Board message boards.
Thanks All
-D1-
Just to let everyone know that if SSC goes down in the next few days I will be slowly migrating everything to a new platform. It will probably not look pretty and there will probably be issues. My main concern is keeping data and files. The bridge/SSO to tie WP and Forums together are sometimes shaky like most of them are and supposedly you will be able to login with your existing password and username and it has worked in my testing but we will see how it does on a more wide scale. SSC will probably be down for a few days when it goes down but it will be coming back online so bare with me, feel free to contact me at admin@spacesimcentral.com if you have any questions or comments. I will probably lock the database soon so I can get the latest snapshot so, SSC will only be in 'view' mode for a while so just preparing you all 🙂
Good work darkone and thanks for what you are doing.
The site has been moved and I haven't done anything major to it to make sure I didn't come across any issues with it running normally before I start tweaking things. So if anyone sees anything please leave me a message or post something in the admin area so I can try to address it.
With moving to PHP7 its a tad risky but it gives the site a huge performance boost and added security.
Guess what? NO DAMN BOTS OR SPAMMERS .... Yet 🙂
I did this move to fight that as well. So I will be looking into the following this month:
- Theme. This will be the biggest hurdle and I am definitely not a huge web theme type of guy with skills so this could take a while but I will not do anything drastic, it will be more subtle and hopefully ease of use. Because I want to make sure forums operate well on mobile as well. It was ugly before and should run a bit better now.
- Security. I will be looking into the grouping security and site file system permissions to secure site even more. I have yet to have any complaints sent about security on site and not being able to do something so until someone complains I think everything is working.
- Work on the blog side (wordpress) side of the site and try to at least put out an article or two a month. This is always a time thing for me.
- Look into some plugins/mods to make peoples experience better or more fulfilling (This is also based on PHP7 availability).
Thanks all for your patience and ability to adjust to something new. Its been tough for me as well since I have learn all new tools.
-D1-
Sorry for the lack of updates with the holidays and trying to finish up all my work stuff before vacation I was busy. I am on vacation now so I will be looking into improvement issues and I will handle any account related issues if I can because I know there was some members that had issues converting there existing accounts.
I will be working on the main menu and trying to address some issues I see on the wordpress site of things. I will also be cleaning up the forums a bit more.
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